NewEnergyNews

Gleanings from the web and the world, condensed for convenience, illustrated for enlightenment, arranged for impact...

While the OFFICE of President remains in highest regard at NewEnergyNews, this administration's position on the climate crisis makes it impossible to regard THIS president with respect. Below is the NewEnergyNews theme song until 2020.

Saturday, December 31, 2016

Seth Meyer Talks Trump And Climate Change

It looks like the incoming administration will make the fight against climate change more complicated but don't panic until the difference is clear between the political noise and where the money goes.From Late Night With Seth Meyers via YouTube

Thursday, December 29, 2016

The 2016 Energy Story That Trumps All Others

“For 2016, one energy story trumps all others: the election of Donald Trump...[which runs totally counter to the preceding eight years and the policies of] President Obama. 2017 will, no doubt, give us a glimpse into whether the nation is on an irreversible course to greener fuels…whether the nation will take deliberate aim at cutting its carbon emissions…whether that will be a byproduct of the undeniable shift from coal-to-natural gas…[and what role the courts will play] in Trump’s radically different energy vision…[It will also reveal how the President-elect will put unemployed coal miners to work and what] happens to the green rush [for] more wind and solar…”click here for more

“…For the first time, more electricity-generating capacity from solar power plants is expected to have been built in the U.S. in 2016 than from natural gas and wind…Though the final tally won’t be in until March, enough new solar power plants were expected to be built in 2016 to total 9.5 gigawatts of solar power generating capacity, tripling the new solar capacity built in 2015…[That will] exceed the 8 gigawatts of natural gas power generating capacity and the 6.8 gigawatts of wind power slated for construction this year. No new coal-fired power plants were planned in 2016…Though U.S. solar power generation was expected to have grown by 44 percent in 2016 and is expected to grow more than 30 percent in 2017, it will still provide around 1 percent of the nation’s electric power…”click here for more

“Oil and gas giants are starting to take a lot more interest in renewable energy…and it could mean a huge shift in direction…The latest sign of change was Statoil, the $59 billion oil giant, selling its…[Alberta oil sands assets] and then winning a wind lease off the coast of New York…This will leave Statoil with no oil sands assets anywhere in the world, a shift from a few years ago when oil sands was viewed as a big growth driver for the oil industry…[Statoil’s winning bid for the New York] lease was $42.47 million…[T]he space could accommodate over 1 GW of wind projects, which would likely cost in excess of $2 billion, although the initial plan will be to build 400 MW to 600 MW…[It adds to Statoil's offshore wind assets in the U.K., Scotland and Germany…French oil company Total is another big oil company that's investing in renewables, although it's focusing on solar through its majority-owned subsidiary SunPower…”click here for more

Telling The Climate Story Smarter

“Climate change storytelling is undergoing a major transition, gaining the attention of politicians, countries and corporations around the world. However, with climate deniers newly emboldened and the upcoming Trump administration threatening to turn back environmental progress, will climate change keep capturing our imagination?...[The Emmy Award-winning “Years of Living Dangerously” is proving it can. The show] brings together celebrities, politicians, business leaders and individuals impacted by climate change to dive deeper into angles of the story than one feature film can capture…

…[The big ensemble of people shows] that climate change is happening now, affecting people in the U.S., and there are thousands of people trying to combat it and plan for it…[It shows] solutions to climate change are getting better in the form of technological developments and the falling cost of solar and wind energy…[It also shows that if] you want people to act, you don’t just throw a bunch of data at them. You get them emotionally engaged…[and it shows there] are real grassroots solutions that people can get involved in…”

Natural gas is the new leader in the electric power mix but there is a growing realization among utilities in some regions of the country that it may not be the best bet on cost over the long term. While gas prices are near historic lows today, few analysts believe they will stay that way. And with a growing global consensus around climate action, many companies expect further regulations on fossil fuels. Set against those doubts is a period of relative stability for large-scale renewable energy, particularly wind. The industry says it has cut installed costs 66% since 2009, and expects them to keep falling. All that has made new investments in wind energy particularly appealing to many utilities, especially those in the center of the country.

Xcel Energy Colorado had a U.S. utility-leading 6,545 MW of wind capacity on its system at the end of 2015 and was also the eighth biggest holder of new wind capacity last year with 350 MW. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy (BHE) has 5,525 MW it its portfolio, ranking it second in total system wind, and its 4,375 MW of owned capacity makes it first in direct wind ownership. Wind energy provided 4.7% of U.S. electricity in 2015, the most of any non-hydro renewable resource. Renewables met 13.7% of the nation’s electricity demand, with hydro leading at 6%. Wind topped the list of new capacity for 2015, providing 41%. Solar was second, with 28.5%, and natural gas was third, with 28.1%. The U.S. wind industry installed 8,598 MW of new capacity across 20 states in 2015, an annual growth rate of 12.3%. It was the industry’s third biggest year ever, a 77% increase over 2014…

Editor’s Note: Since this piece ran, regulators blocked the HECO-Next Era merger and the utility has begun rethinking its long term plan.

The Hawaiian Electric Companies (HECO) Power Supply Improvement Plan (PSIP), filed April 1, is their third attempt at a roadmap to detail how the utility will comply with Hawaii's historic Act 97, which mandated that the state shift to 100% renewable electricity generation by 2045.In an interview with Utility Dive, Colton Ching, HECO's vice president for energy delivery, said the new plan will help his utility end its current reliance on fossil fuels (especially fuel oil) for electricity generation and change the paradigm so that renewables do not supplement the system but are the entire energy system with a diverse portfolio of renewables.

Overall, the two-volume, 1,200-plus page filing (docket 2014-0183) calls for Hawaii’s 2045 electricity generation mix to be composed of 16.1% distributed solar, 10.2% utility-scale solar, 33.4% onshore and offshore wind energy, 26.9% biofuels, 6.5% geothermal energy, 6.5% waste and biomass, and 0.4% hydropower. The utility intends to exceed Act 97 requirements by getting to 100% renewables for Molokai and Lanai by 2030 and by 2040 for Maui and Hawaii Island. Achieving those levels of renewable penetration will allow it to meet the 70% system-wide renewables target by 2040 while it scales Oahu, the most populous island, up to 100% renewables. The question of whether it emphasizes distributed generation adequately and is transparent enough remains to be decided…

Editor’s Note: The natgas supply to Southern California remains compromised and the region’s utilities have begun moving to fill gaps in the summer and winter electricity supply with energy efficiency and distributed energy resources.

The day the lights go out in Hollywood may be coming, the top California energy agencies say. As a result of the worst natural gas leak in U.S. history at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility, electricity supply in the Los Angeles region could be threatened during peak demand periods, according to reports prepared by California utility regulators, the grid operator, the state energy office and the city's municipal utility. The leak reduced Aliso Canyon's gas stores to less than 20% of its capacity, which could spell trouble for the 17 natural gas generators served by the facility if electric demand is high, according to the Aliso Canyon Risk Assessment Technical Report. That report, prepared by analysts at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), California Energy Commission (CEC), California Independent System Operator (CAISO), and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), warned that "curtailments could interrupt service and affect millions of electric customers.”

In response, the four California agencies released an Action Plan to preserve reliability in the Los Angeles area. It proposes 18 mitigation measures for the issues identified in the technical assessment, but critics say the plan fails to pose the hard questions about whether California has, in pursuit of eliminating coal and adding renewables to its grid, become too reliant on natural gas.The plan classifies the mitigations in five categories: efficient use of Aliso Canyon; tariff changes to drive more efficiency from large gas consumers on the system; better operational coordination; LADWP-specific measures; and general electricity and gas efficiency measures. Some will entail costs and some will require regulatory approval. One has caused a debate that must be resolved in the near term. Another has sparked a conversation that Californians may be having on for years…

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

TODAY’S STUDY: The Way To A Price On Carbon

The corporate income tax and domestic carbon policy are two areas of concern in dire need of reform. In both cases, protracted political infighting has inhibited progress on legislative solutions. The tax code remains as voluminous and convoluted as ever. The outgoing administration spent eight years expanding its authority to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without ever receiving congressional authorization.

Progress on tax reform has been stymied by clear revenue needs. Though there is growing consensus on the need to reduce the U.S. corporate income tax, the available policy tools to achieve that goal – such as a European-style Value Added Tax or broad-based taxes on consumption—remain politically unpopular. Meanwhile, political fissures and a lack of motivation to find bipartisan agreement continue to block progress on greenhouse gas emissions.

Though it would no doubt be politically adventurous, there is a way to pair these two policy areas to yield an economically optimal tradeoff: an orchestrated swap of existing taxes on stuff we like for new taxes on stuff we don’t. This swap could take any number of forms. Policy analysts and advocacy groups have in the past advanced proposals to use the proceeds from a tax on carbon emissions to reduce taxes on labor, on capital or on some combination thereof.

Despite the political baggage associated with the climate debate, lawmakers could soon discover—as they attempt to slay the corporate tax code’s many sacred cows—that a price on carbon just might be the easiest way to finance substantial tax reform. Moreover, the combination of a price on carbon with deep reductions in corporate tax rates would reduce government interference in the private market and in the energy market, in particular.

Given the salience of those goals, this paper proposes a politically feasible and revenue-neutral plan to use a price on carbon emissions to eliminate the U.S. corporate income tax completely.

The economic literature suggests that taxes on capital, which are broadly distributed throughout the tax code, are the most distortionary form of taxation. Efforts to reduce taxes on capital thus rank among the best ways to induce economic growth. Alas, systematically ferreting out the many ways the existing rules tax capital would require radical changes to the code and a lengthy period of transition, and likely would prove politically impossible.

A simpler approach to achieve many of the same goals would be to eliminate the corporate income tax. Of course, this idea would face political challenges of its own, given that the corporate income tax is quite popular. Roughly 70 percent of Americans say they want companies to “pay their fair share” of the tax burden.1 President Barack Obama marshalled this sentiment earlier this year, when his Treasury Department proposed a set of rules to combat corporate tax inversions, suggesting companies that incorporate abroad are “gaming the system” at the expense of the middle class.

What isn’t controversial among tax policy economists is that the corporate income tax is highly distortionary, costing roughly $140 billion annually in compliance costs. It’s also highly inefficient. Though the United States has the highest nominal corporate rate among Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development nations, the corporate tax manages to bring in just 10 to 12 percent of federal tax revenue. Moreover, as demonstrated in a prior R Street policy short, the burden of taxes on corporate income actually falls on a combination of employees, customers and shareholders.3

The good news is that broad bipartisan agreement for corporate tax reform has been building for several years. This appears to be, at least in part, a consequence of mounting evidence that exceedingly high U.S. corporate taxes are pushing jobs, investments and companies themselves overseas. The wave of inversions—in which U.S. companies move their legal domiciles to lower-tax nations—has brought attention to the problem, while the lingering lackluster recovery from the last recession is seen to reflect underinvestment in the domestic workforce…

Corporate Income Tax Repeal…Carbon Tax Receipts…Pro-Growth Design…

Tax Swap Summary

In this paper, we have elucidated a path to eliminate the corporate income tax outright and instead impose a direct price on carbon. This is a combination specifically designed to promote economic growth and strengthen domestic job creation. It requires conceding two points. First, the corporate income tax—politically popular though it may be—is paid by workers, customers and investors, not by companies themselves. Second, price signals and market forces will go further at lower cost to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy economy.

It is no understatement to say that eliminating the burden of the corporate income tax would be a huge boon to job creation, income growth and investment. While most tax reform proposals suggest modest reductions in the corporate rate to better align it with the tax rates of OECD nations, outright elimination of the corporate income tax is a more radical approach that would establish the United States—with clear rule of law, a well-trained workforce and abundant intellectual and natural resources—as the ideal place to do business. High U.S. corporate taxes have fueled an exodus to lower-tax jurisdictions like Ireland and others. Eliminating the corporate income tax would reverse that exodus immediately

This revenue-neutral swap must also be used to shrink the footprint of government in the energy sector. In the absence of congressional legislation to address greenhouse gas emissions, the executive branch and the states have proliferated a number of policies that take the place of a comprehensive national plan. We expect that a robust price on carbon at the federal level justifies not just rolling back redundant federal policies, but also would encourage states to abandon efforts to create a patchwork of carbon policies.

This would mean backing away from interstate carbon credit trading programs like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and iterative policies that mandate certain percentages of energy come from renewable sources. At a minimum, we expect that systems that trade in carbon credits will no longer be binding; the federal price on carbon will be more significant and durable than the carbon markets have been. In an ideal scenario, we would eliminate state policies that make investments and energy trade across the states more difficult.

This revenue-neutral swap also would serve as an excellent model for other nations. Policies like the European Union Emissions Trading System are perfect examples of overdesigned and unsuccessful carbon policies. Directly pricing emissions is an elegant approach that leaves all further decision-making on pathways, investments and innovation to a private sector that would be motivated by a predictable price signal. Directly pricing emissions also allows, as we see here, significant changes in existing tax structures that hold back growth.

Expectations across the carbon pricing literature suggest that a carbon tax with an increasing rate of taxation would bring in higher levels of receipts year-over-year until emissions reductions outweigh rate increases and receipts begin to drop. It is a feature, not a bug, of a carbon tax that it eventually would take in no revenue. A carbon price is a policy specifically designed to put itself out of business. By setting the benchmark that lower taxes are wise policy and that specific policy outcomes can be achieved while simultaneously shrinking the government’s footprint, this proposal could serve as a model for policies that reduce the size of government broadly.

It is possible to achieve dramatic reform in the corporate income tax structure and in our approach to carbon emissions simultaneously. Of course, this proposal has its limits. Corporate income taxes remain popular, and calls to make sure companies “pay their fair share” will make it difficult to enact such ambitious policy change. A direct price on carbon emissions remains unpopular on the center-right and the center-left remains focused on a regulatory commandand-control model to reduce emissions. It will be difficult to break through these walls of opposition.

Moreover, this proposal only goes so far. Broad reductions in taxes on capital across the tax code would do the most to spur domestic investment. This version of a carbon price addresses only emissions related to energy usage, an area in which the private sector has had dramatic success even without government policy. To address the many diverse sources of emissions would require policy changes outside the scope of this proposal.

We posit the proposed tax swap’s greatest strength is that it accepts that we simply don’t know how to shape investment in the corporate sector or how to dictate carbon emission reductions in the energy sector. By curbing the influence of special interests to dictate corporate tax structures and the constantly expanding regulatory state, we can leave decision making about the future of the economy to the markets, not the limited imagination of bureaucrats. This will make the United States a better place to do business.

Finally, the proposal outlined in this paper relies on simplistic back-of-the-envelope constructions to pursue an interesting idea: eliminating the corporate income tax and the abundant energy regulatory burden. We hope this proposal inspires efforts to model this exchange with far greater granularity, particularly to explore the extent to which corporate income tax elimination will be self-financing and to identify a carbon price that would ensure revenue neutrality

QUICK NEWS, December 27: State Policies And Low Costs Will Sustain The U.S. Climate Fight (Part 1); State Policies And Low Costs Will Sustain The U.S. Climate Fight (Part 2); New Energy And NatGas Are 93% of 2016 U.S. Power Growth

“State governments will serve as an important bulwark against any attempt by President-elect Donald Trump to roll back the progress the United States has made in addressing climate change…Over the last decade or so, most states have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by promoting energy efficiency and renewable fuels. These trends should continue as clean energy costs continue to decline and, in some parts of the country, fall below the cost of dirtier fuels like coal…[B]etween 2000 and 2014, 33 states and the District of Columbia cut carbon emissions while expanding their economies…That list includes red states run by Republican legislatures, like Alaska, Georgia, Tennessee and West Virginia…It’s hard to know how Mr. Trump will change climate policy, but it is almost certain that he won’t advance it…The people he has chosen to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Department of Interior — the three agencies with the greatest influence on energy policy — have either denied or expressed skepticism that human activity is causing global warming, something that virtually all scientists agree on…[But in] some states, including Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska and parts of Texas, new wind turbines can generate electricity at a lower cost, without subsidies, than any other technology…”click here for more

“…[Many people expect President-elect Trump to walk away from President Obama’s commitments under the Paris climate agreement and get rid of or weaken the E.P.A.’s Clean Power Plan, which requires states to lower carbon emissions from the electricity sector. He and his appointees might also try to water down fuel economy regulations for cars and trucks, and cut clean energy tax incentives and research spending…States could blunt much of that damage…California and New York plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Hawaii hopes to get all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045…[and many other states have slightly more modest goals]…Cheap natural gas, which has increasingly replaced coal as a fuel source, has had a lot to do with this progress, but so has the drop in the cost of wind and solar power — 41 percent in the case of land-based wind turbines and 64 percent for solar, between 2008 and 2015…

…The cost of batteries has dropped by almost three-fourths…[In some states, new wind turbines] can generate electricity at a lower cost, without subsidies, than any other technology…Solar panels have not reached that point yet in the United States, but developers of big solar installations in [some] countries…have signed contracts to sell electricity for much less than conventional fossil fuel plants charge…States are also beginning to put a price on carbon emissions to increase the cost of older fuels and encourage cleaner sources of energy, which Congress has refused to do…Lawmakers, environmental groups and individuals who care about climate change ought to fight every effort to take the country backward on this issue. But it will be just as important for them to support states that are trying to advance the cause.”

“Electric generating facilities expect to add more than 26 gigawatts (GW) of utility-scale generating capacity to the power grid during 2016. Most of these additions come from three resources: solar (9.5 GW), natural gas (8.0 GW), and wind (6.8 GW), which together make up 93% of total additions. If actual additions ultimately reflect these plans, 2016 will be the first year in which utility-scale solar additions exceed additions from any other single energy source…This level of [utility-scale solar] additions is substantially higher than the 3.1 GW of solar added in 2015 and would be more than the total solar installations for the past three years combined (9.4 GW during 2013-15)…Most capacity additions over the past 20 years have been natural gas-fired units. About 8 GW is expected to be added this year, slightly above the 7.8 GW average annual additions over the previous five years…Additions of wind capacity are expected to be slightly lower than in 2015, when 8.1 GW of wind made up by far the largest portion of 2015 capacity additions. Wind capacity additions in 2016 are expected to total 6.8 GW…Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar 2 nuclear facility in southeastern Tennessee, with a summer nameplate capacity of 1.1 GW…will be the first new nuclear reactor brought online in the United States in 20 years…”click here for more

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Climate Change And The Power Of Images

“…[Images and representations play a critical role in enhancing climate change knowledge and understanding…[and are] powerful ways of facilitating the climate story…[Whether horrific or plain, they] influence our thinking and shape our emotions towards how we feel about climate change…While horrific images have the power to change human behaviour, they also can raise awareness and inspire people to engage in concrete climate action. Climate action is the underlying factor in sustainable mitigation and adaptation activities…They also help us interrogate the way we engage in climate change issues, in terms of guidance, application and facilitation…

Images can help communicate climate issues, not in the abstract sense, but in concrete and real terms…[and they] can capture people’s attention and spur them to act…[They also] help to enforce a sense of urgency in changing people’s behaviours, attitudes and perceptions, as well as some deeply entrenched myths and beliefs…The endorsement of climate change action by politicians and celebrities could help show that climate change is a serious issue that requires immediate attention…[and] promote both external and internal motivation of how best to deal with the climate change phenomena…When used well, climate change visuals and images can work as part of a bigger communication strategy…”

“…Conventional wisdom – and in fact the seemingly obvious message from this past election – is that…[if] you want to get elected as a conservative, you have got to be anti-science…[Buta study from Yale and George Mason Universitiesfound almost] 70% of registered voters in the U.S. believe that their country should participate in international agreements to limit global warming. Only 1 in 8 registered voters believe the U.S. should not…Similarly, 70% of respondents support limits on carbon dioxide…American voters are more knowledgeable about energy and the energy economy than is the president elect…More than half of voters understand that transitioning to newer and cleaner fuels will improve economic growth and create new jobs…[Only a] small minority believe that transitioning to a clean-energy system will hurt the economy. Furthermore, a majority support exploring clean and renewable energy on public lands by a very large margin…”click here for more

Wind Price Now Beating NatGas

“…Federal regulators approved transmission lines that will carry the electricity generated at [the 1,000-turbine Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farm in the plains of southern Wyoming] across state lines…[about the same time researchers concluded that in] some regions of the country, wind is now cost-competitive with natural gas, which is one of the cheapest and most reliable electricity fuel sources in the U.S…Renewable energy projects have become an increasingly viable way to meet electricity demand in the United States and are rapidly encroaching on the domain of coal and natural gas…Thanks to advancing technologies, everything from turbine blades to battery storage is cheaper and more efficient, according toLazard 9.0…[L]and-based wind costs are between $32 and $62 per megawatt hour, compared with a combined-cycle natural gas plant, which would cost between $48 and $78 per megawatt hour…”click here for more

Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars that will ReCharge America by Sherry Boschert: "Smart companies plan ahead and try to be the first to adopt new technology that will give them a competitive advantage. That’s what Toyota and Honda did with hybrids, and now they’re sitting pretty. Whichever company is first to bring a good plug-in hybrid to market will not only change their fortune but change the world."

Oil On The Brain; Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline by Lisa Margonelli: "Spills are one of the costs of oil consumption that don’t appear at the pump. [Oil consultant Dagmar Schmidt Erkin]’s data shows that 120 million gallons of oil were spilled in inland waters between 1985 and 2003. From that she calculates that between 1980 and 2003, pipelines spilled 27 gallons of oil for every billion “ton miles” of oil they transported, while barges and tankers spilled around 15 gallons and trucks spilled 37 gallons. (A ton of oil is 294 gallons. If you ship a ton of oil for one mile you have one ton mile.) Right now the United States ships about 900 billion ton miles of oil and oil products per year."

NOTEWORTHY IN THE MEDIA:
NewEnergyNews would welcome any media-saavy volunteer who would like to re-develop this section of the page. Announcements and reviews of film, television, radio and music related to energy and environmental issues are welcome.

Review of OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades by Mark S. Friedman

OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades, the second volume of Herman K. Trabish’s retelling of oil’s history in fiction, picks up where the first book in the series, OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction, left off. The new book is an engrossing, informative and entertaining tale of the Roaring 20s, World War II and the Cold War. You don’t have to know anything about the first historical fiction’s adventures set between the Civil War, when oil became a major commodity, and World War I, when it became a vital commodity, to enjoy this new chronicle of the U.S. emergence as a world superpower and a world oil power.

As the new book opens, Lefash, a minor character in the first book, witnesses the role Big Oil played in designing the post-Great War world at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Unjustly implicated in a murder perpetrated by Big Oil agents, LeFash takes the name Livingstone and flees to the U.S. to clear himself. Livingstone’s quest leads him through Babe Ruth’s New York City and Al Capone’s Chicago into oil boom Oklahoma. Stymied by oil and circumstance, Livingstone marries, has a son and eventually, surprisingly, resolves his grievances with the murderer and with oil.

In the new novel’s second episode the oil-and-auto-industry dynasty from the first book re-emerges in the charismatic person of Victoria Wade Bridger, “the woman everybody loved.” Victoria meets Saudi dynasty founder Ibn Saud, spies for the State Department in the Vichy embassy in Washington, D.C., and – for profound and moving personal reasons – accepts a mission into the heart of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. Underlying all Victoria’s travels is the struggle between the allies and axis for control of the crucial oil resources that drove World War II.

As the Cold War begins, the novel’s third episode recounts the historic 1951 moment when Britain’s MI-6 handed off its operations in Iran to the CIA, marking the end to Britain’s dark manipulations and the beginning of the same work by the CIA. But in Trabish’s telling, the covert overthrow of Mossadeq in favor of the ill-fated Shah becomes a compelling romance and a melodramatic homage to the iconic “Casablanca” of Bogart and Bergman.

Monty Livingstone, veteran of an oil field youth, European WWII combat and a star-crossed post-war Berlin affair with a Russian female soldier, comes to 1951 Iran working for a U.S. oil company. He re-encounters his lost Russian love, now a Soviet agent helping prop up Mossadeq and extend Mother Russia’s Iranian oil ambitions. The reunited lovers are caught in a web of political, religious and Cold War forces until oil and power merge to restore the Shah to his future fate. The romance ends satisfyingly, America and the Soviet Union are the only forces left on the world stage and ambiguity is resolved with the answer so many of Trabish’s characters ultimately turn to: Oil.

Commenting on a recent National Petroleum Council report calling for government subsidies of the fossil fuels industries, a distinguished scholar said, “It appears that the whole report buys these dubious arguments that the consumer of energy is somehow stupid about energy…” Trabish’s great and important accomplishment is that you cannot read his emotionally engaging and informative tall tales and remain that stupid energy consumer. With our world rushing headlong toward Peak Oil and epic climate change, the OIL IN THEIR BLOOD series is a timely service as well as a consummate literary performance.

Review of OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction by Mark S. Friedman

"...ours is a culture of energy illiterates." (Paul Roberts, THE END OF OIL)

OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, a superb new historical fiction by Herman K. Trabish, addresses our energy illiteracy by putting the development of our addiction into a story about real people, giving readers a chance to think about how our addiction happened. Trabish's style is fine, straightforward storytelling and he tells his stories through his characters.

The book is the answer an oil family's matriarch gives to an interviewer who asks her to pass judgment on the industry. Like history itself, it is easier to tell stories about the oil industry than to judge it. She and Trabish let readers come to their own conclusions.

She begins by telling the story of her parents in post-Civil War western Pennsylvania, when oil became big business. This part of the story is like a John Ford western and its characters are classic American melodramatic heroes, heroines and villains.

In Part II, the matriarch tells the tragic story of the second generation and reveals how she came to be part of the tales. We see oil become an international commodity, traded on Wall Street and sought from London to Baku to Mesopotamia to Borneo. A baseball subplot compares the growth of the oil business to the growth of baseball, a fascinating reflection of our current president's personal career.

There is an unforgettable image near the center of the story: International oil entrepreneurs talk on a Baku street. This is Trabish at his best, portraying good men doing bad and bad men doing good, all laying plans for wealth and power in the muddy, oily alley of a tiny ancient town in the middle of everywhere. Because Part I was about triumphant American heroes, the tragedy here is entirely unexpected, despite Trabish's repeated allusions to other stories (Casey At The Bat, Hamlet) that do not end well.

In the final section, World War I looms. Baseball takes a back seat to early auto racing and oil-fueled modernity explodes. Love struggles with lust. A cavalry troop collides with an army truck. Here, Trabish has more than tragedy in mind. His lonely, confused young protagonist moves through the horrible destruction of the Romanian oilfields only to suffer worse and worse horrors, until--unexpectedly--he finds something, something a reviewer cannot reveal. Finally, the question of oil must be settled, so the oil industry comes back into the story in a way that is beyond good and bad, beyond melodrama and tragedy.

Along the way, Trabish gives readers a greater awareness of oil and how we became addicted to it. Awareness, Paul Roberts said in THE END OF OIL, "...may be the first tentative step toward building a more sustainable energy economy. Or it may simply mean that when our energy system does begin to fail, and we begin to lose everything that energy once supplied, we won't be so surprised."

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